370 PEOTECTION AGAINST ANIMALS. 



Protection against Wild Animals. 



It is often necessary to take measures for the protection of 

 young trees against the rabbit, the mole, and other rodent quad- 

 rupeds ; and of older ones against the damage done by the larvaa 

 of insects hatched upon the sm-face or in the tissues of the bark, 

 or even in the wood itseH. The much greater liability of the 

 artificial than of the natural forest to injury from this cause, is 

 perhaps the only point in which the superiority of the former to 

 the latter is not as marked as that of any domesticated vegetable 

 to its wild representative. But the better quality of the wood 

 and the much more rapid growth of the trained and regulated 

 forest are abundant compensations for the loss thus occasioned, 

 and the progress of entomological science will, perhaps, suggest 

 new methods of preventing the ravages of insects. Thus far, 

 however, the collection and destruction of the eggs, by simple 

 but expensive means, has proved the most effectual remedy.* 



* I have remarked elsewhere that most insects which deposit and hatch their 

 eggs in the wood of the natural forest confine themselves to dead trees. Not 

 only is this the fact, hut it is also true that many of the borers attack only 

 freshly-cut timber. Their season of labor is a short one, and unless the tree 

 is cut during this period, it is safe from them. In summer you may hear 

 them plying their augers in the wood of a young pine with soft, green bark, 

 as you sit upon its trunk, within a week after it has been felled, but the wind- 

 falls of the winter lie uninjured by the worm and even undecayed for centu- 

 ries. In the pine woods of New England, after the regular lumberman has re- 

 moved the standing trees, these old trunks are hauled out from the mosses 

 and leaves which half cover them, and often furnish excellent timber. The 

 slow decay of such timber in the woods, it may be remarked, furnishes an- 

 other proof of the uniformity of temperature and humidity in the forest, for 

 the trunk of a tree lying on grass or ploughland, and of course exposed to 

 all the alternations of climate, hardly resists complete decomposition for a 

 generation. The forests of Europe exhibit similar facts. Wessely, in a de- 

 scription of the primitive wood of Neuwald in Lower Austria, says that the 

 windfalls required from 150 to 200 years for entire decay. — Die Oesterrelch 

 iachen Alijenlander und Hire Forste, p. 312. 



The comparative immunity of the American native forests from attacks by 

 insects is perhaps in some degree due to the fact that the European destructiv 

 tribes have not yet found their way across the ocean, and that our native specie- 

 are less injurious to living trees. On the European lignivorous insects, see 

 SiEMONi, Manuale d' Arte Forestale, 2d edizione, pp. 369-379. 



